MetaCPAN Archives

First of all, I love CPAN. CPAN was the first of its kind, to provide an extensive and official library of modules that support the language itself. CPAN is very much a part of Perl as much as regular expressions are. Without CPAN, Perl would never be as versatile or useful as it exists now.

But, CPAN is also very old. It's been around since late 1995, almost 20 years now. As such, it has grown to house many thousands of modules, 119,124 to be exact (as of today). Many would consider that virtue, as you can find almost anything you want on CPAN. However, it betrays a underlying…